It’s a fairly well-written leadership development book offering a very compelling framework for assessing your leadership level and identifying the competencies you need to develop in order to evolve your leadership to the next stage.

Even though the authors acknowledge that there’s more to leadership than anticipating and initiative change and therefore keep the focus on “leadership agility”, given how much of a leader’s role is anticipating and initiating change, I view this as a book about leadership, period.

The first part of the book provides an overview of the framework and a good high level illustration of it, by replaying the same dinner conversation, each time with a person at a different stage of leadership agility.

The third part focuses on assessing your own leadership agility and charting a path for improving it.

The second part is the heart of the book, consisting of five chapters mirroring the five leadership agility stages in the framework: Expert, Achiever, Catalyst, Co-Creator and Synergist. Each stage is described through two perspectives (supported by case studies/real-world examples):

An outside-in perspective: covering how a leader at each level anticipates and initiate change at three different scales:

Pivotal conversations

Leading teams

Leading organizational change

An inside-out perspective: covering how a leader’s five key competencies develop at each stage:

Awareness & intent

Context setting agility:

Situational awareness

Sense of purpose

Stakeholder agility:

Stakeholder understanding

Power style

Creative agility:

Reflective judgement

Connective awareness

Self-leadership agility:

Self-awareness

Developmental motivation

The first perspective is summarized in the book neatly in the book in the following table:

The second, however, is not summarized anywhere, which is one of the book’s greatest drawbacks. The good news is that I thought that creating one will be a good way for me to get more value out of the book. It’s a bit of an eye-chart, so I suggest printing it out if you want to give it a more thorough read:

In this long(er)-form version of an Asana blog post, Justin adds more color on how to establish the three types of clarity needed for creating a highly effective team:

Clarity of Purpose – Having everybody on the same page about the “why?” – “if we’re wildly successful, how would the world be different?”

Clarity of Plan – This is all about “how” of accomplishing this vision. From the strategic principles through measurable key results to the projects that aim to move the needle on each of them.

Clarity of Responsibility – This is the one that often doesn’t get as much attention as it should and pertains to the “who” – “Clarity of responsibility ensures that one person holds ultimate responsibility for each piece of the plan”. Areas of Responsibility (AoR) which I’ve covered before, can be a very powerful enabler of this type of clarity.